Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

by John Scalzi

  Well, obviously, because I wanted to, and because I could. I wanted to for a number of reasons, some undoubtedly rooted in fundamental biology (living things naturally wish to make more of their number), but more—and more influentially—because of the conscious desire to be a father, which is something I’ve always had so long as I could remember thinking about the subject of breeding at all. This isn’t to say I was in a rush to become a father—I didn’t become one until I was 29, after all—merely that it was on the agenda of things to do with my life. On this matter, I was additionally helped in that a) I met a woman willing to conjoin her genetic material with mine and b) that said genetic material was up the task; i.e., my boys could swim.

  But you say: I could have as easily been a father and experienced all the joys of parenting by adopting. That’s true enough. And to be perfectly honest about it, I’m very big on the concept of adoption. My family, through my mother, has experienced adoption from both sides of the adoption coin: When she was 16, she put a child up for adoption (my brother Robert, whom I met when I was in middle school), and then when she was 54, she adopted a child of her own. I’m not personally opposed to the idea of adopting a child with Krissy, either. We’ve discussed it from time to time when we talk about whether we want to have additional kids. And who knows, one day we may adopt. Regardless of whether we do or not, I think adoptive parents make an unmistakably strong statement of parental love by affirmatively choosing their child to love and care for and as such have, and always have had, my admiration. So yes: Adopt, if you like. It’s a good thing.

  For all that, I think I can make a compelling case for making a child the old-fashioned way. First off, there are the economics. To be coldly fiscal about it, adopting a child costs a lot of money, whereas, assuming normal fertility, making one of one’s own does not (and it’s fun besides, which is an adjective I have yet to hear anyone apply to the adoption process). As a matter of policy, I would and do support ways to bring down the cost of adopting a child (bring on the tax credits!) to make adoption affordable for every family who wishes to adopt. But at the moment, we’re not there.

  Second, I believe that both my wife and I offer a compelling set of genes to the proverbial pool: Both of us are fit and intelligent and have no family history of inherited diseases or other afflictions, either physical or mental. It seemed likely that our offspring would also be fit, intelligent and healthy, and indeed, so she is. I would argue that the gene pool and the overall hybrid vigor of our entire species is incrementally enhanced by our contribution to it, and thereby the positives provided by such a genetic union rather greatly outweigh the negatives associated with bringing yet another human onto this groaning sphere.

  To restate the above on a more personal level, I was also intensely curious to see what a child of mine would be like—and more specifically, a child of mine and Krissy’s. Yon agitated childdespiser rather derisively asked why I would want to clone myself, and in fact I wouldn’t. There’s already been one of me, and I think we can all agree that one is sufficient. But in the entire history of the universe, there has never been someone like Athena, who is, for the moment at least, the summation of a couple billion years of evolution as expressed through the genetic lines which run through myself and my wife.

  The combination of those lines results in an individual who is synergistic—more than the sum of her parts, and uniquely her own person thereby. To be sure, I see myself in her, as well as her mother. But mostly I see Athena. For herself alone, and not for the mere continuation of my own genetics, is her existence amply justifiable, and thus my desire to have her come into being. You are free to disagree, of course. But honestly, now. Ask me if I care.

  As regards bringing children into the awful, terrible world: whatever. The toddlerkickers may believe it’s a terrible time to bring a human into the world, but when has it not been? Pick a year, any year, that humans have deigned to grace with a sense of history, and you’ll undoubtedly discover that it’s an atrocious and utterly irresponsible moment to birth another generation of homo sapiens. Tell me that there are too many humans on this planet, and I’d agree—but then I’d ask you why it must then necessarily follow that I must volunteer my own genes for extinction. As far as I’m concerned, the issue is not only that there are too many people, but simultaneously too few like me. Breed a few more of my line, and then we might have enough people to vote in a President who doesn’t think that providing birth control to third-world women who desperately need it is a moral evil—thereby reducing the human surplus far more effectively than by my falling on my genetic sword.

  Agreed, too many children die daily. But this is not in itself an argument against my producing a child of my own. My child is almost certain not to die of starvation, or curable disease, or war, or neglect or ignorance or any of the reasons that the vast majority of those children die every day. This child is as safe from harm as any child not trapped in a plastic bubble can be. I can’t save 40,000 children a day, but I can be a good parent for one every day, and I try to do that. Agreed, breeding is a selfish act, probably the fundamental selfish act—one is, after all, passing on one’s genes. But I’ve read enough “childfree” griping about having to pay for schools with their taxes not to be terribly worried about these particular pots calling the kettle black.

  So in summation: I breed because I can, because I want to, because I believe my doing so is a net benefit to humanity and planet (or at the very least presents no net damage) and because I expected to be (and am) fully pleased with the results. I realize these reasons are almost certainly insufficient to satisfy the babyslappers, but as there’s not likely to be any reason that would satisfy them, I’m hard-pressed to be deeply concerned about that fact. Indeed, I wish I could say that I breed specifically to piss them off. Alas, I do not. It’s merely a fringe benefit.

  ———

  * Standard disclaimers: Not everyone who chooses not to have children is an obnoxious hater of the pre-adult; you are sensible people and know who you are. This taunting does not apply to you. The relevant pathology of the unpleasantly childfree is not that they are childfree, but that they are unpleasant. They would very likely be unpleasant no matter what subject they chose to get worked up about.

  Additionally: Not everyone who is a parent deserves to be; some—hell, many—need to be mulched in a wood chipper. And there are plenty of children who ought to follow their so-called parents right into said chipper. Just in case you thought I thought these particular populations were not capable of rank dumbassery.

  Update: The sender of the original e-mail says (in a new e-mail): “Someone as arrogant as you does not deserve a beautiful child like Athena.” Well, this is probably true. But as Clint Eastwood once said, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.

  POINT OF

  PRIVILEGE

  Over the last week or so I’ve heard rumors of some sort of “privilege list,” which was developed by some academics to make their students aware that whatever level of privilege they had before they got to college, they were all at the same place now (which is Indiana State University, apparently). I heard about it mostly via people being really pissed at its sloppy construction and slapping down a link to my “Being Poor” entry as a contrast, but tonight I finally got a look at the list itself. I have to say I’m really not at all impressed with the list, primarily because as indicators of class and privilege, many if not most of the things on the list are non-responsive in the real world.

  If you’re doing the exercise, you’re supposed to take a step forward if one of the listed statements is true for you; the idea being, apparently, that any step forward is a mark of privilege, or a class indicator. Just for fun, I’ll point out some of these statements, and why they aren’t one or the other or both.

  If were read children’s books by a parent

  As far as I can remember, my mother never read children’s books to me. But that’s because I learned to read when I was two; I read my own children�
�s books, thanks much. My mother did, however, read to me books meant for adult readers. As it happens, I don’t read children’s books to Athena, either, because she learned to read almost as early as I did; at bedtime when she was younger, she insisted on reading her books to us.

  The exercise also lists having books in the home as a mark of privilege or class, but inasmuch as I grew up poor in a house jammed with books, many bought for a quarter at a yard sale or thrift store, I would dispute that it’s a mark of either. Clearly the folks who thought up this list are used to thinking of books as being expensive rather than really cheap entertainment.

  If you went to a private high school

  I went to a private high school; a really good and expensive one, too. And on vacations when my friends were going back home to big houses, I was going back to a single-wide trailer. Was I privileged? In one sense, certainly. In most other ways, well, no, not so much.

  Going to a private school, incidentally, radically skews a number of other privilege indicators on this list. For example:

  If you were the same or higher class than your high school teachers

  Doesn’t work, because while most of the kids who attended my school would have nominally have been of a higher social stratum than the teachers, we in fact had some very well-off teachers. My history teacher was a scion of the Fawcett publishing family; he donated the school library building. Named it after his mom, which was sweet. Why did he teach history at a high school if he could buy entire libraries? I would suppose because he liked it. By the strictures of this particular metric, however, many kids at my school would not have counted as “privileged,” even the ones who got Mercedes for their birthdays.

  Here’s another non-indicator:

  If you had your own TV in your room in High School

  None of the very privileged kids in my high school had a TV in their room—because we lived at a boarding school, and TV wasn’t allowed. They had all manner of very expensive audio equipment, though. Likewise, almost none of the kids at my high school had this ostensible privilege marker:

  If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course

  Because my high school was a college preparatory school. You’d be getting the benefits of an SAT/ACT prep course just by going to your classes. And here’s a funny one:

  If your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

  Because when your dad gives you his two-year-old BMW because he got a new one, you’re not going to complain because it doesn’t have that new car smell. One more, to bring the point home:

  If your family vacations involved staying at hotels

  Why on earth would you stay at a hotel if you had a vacation home?

  Well, you say, at least all the rich kids can step forward for this one:

  If the people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively

  Clearly, these people have never seen Pretty in Pink or Less Than Zero, to use two examples from my day.

  Somewhat unrelated, another silly one:

  If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

  Leaving aside the idea that if you grew up in, say, Southern California, heating bills would not be a major topic, I can say that as a sometimes very poor child I rarely knew the sums of various utility bills, because I was a kid. I knew whether my mom was stressed about the bills, which I suspect is the point here, poorly worded. Be that as it may, a kid from an upper class situation might know the sums of her family’s heating bills if her parents chose to give her an idea of family economics, to teach her to be fiscally prudent—which is not unknown behavior in those who are well off because they are smart with their money. Athena has asked about our bills, because she’s curious; we’ve told her about them. I doubt anyone would suggest our spawn is not relatively privileged.

  Well, you say, that’s all just you, or specific people you know. Well, yes. This is my point. And for probably any person, there are things on this list meant to signify privilege that don’t, or are meant to exclude privilege that could be signs of substantial privilege—just ask the boarding school student driving dad’s old Beemer to the vacation house by the shore while his middle-class friends are stuck in an SAT review session. For nearly all of the “privilege markers” in this exercise, one can come up with excellent reasons why they are not an issue of privilege or class at all.

  Which means that for the purposes of this exercise—showing indicators of privilege and class—this list is not actually useful, and indeed counter-productive. In this exercise, it’s entirely possible for someone of a lower social class to appear more “privileged” than someone who is of the “rich and snooty” class. This doesn’t create awareness of privilege; it does, however, create awareness of the essential lameness of this particular exercise. This may be why the exercise notes warn that “anger will be a primary emotion.” I would be angry, too, if my time were wasted on an exercise like this.

  (Don’t even get me started on what a pile of crap the “Social Class Knowledge Quiz,” also available at the link above, is. Some of us know what Choate and a “full pull” are.)

  As an aside, one of the things that gets me about this “privilege” exercise is how actually divorced from class it is, primarily because so many of the privilege indicators are trivial consumer items well within the reach of all but the most poor among us. My gas station convenience store has pay-as-you-go cell phones for less than it costs to pay for an XBox game; at this point it’s not a mark of privilege for a teenager to have one. I can go to Wal-Mart and pick up a TV for under $100 or a desktop computer for $300; not very good ones in either case, but that’s not the point. My local mall has a Steve and Barry’s in it; you have to work hard to buy something there that costs more than $15. Shopping in a mall isn’t much of a class indicator, either. Hasn’t been for a while now.

  Elizabeth Bear, in commenting about this exercise, notes: “If I were writing it, it would have things like, ‘Did you receive regular dental care and vaccinations as a child?’ on it.” She’s spot on. The vector of privilege these days is not physical items, but how well one is cared for, or can care for one’s self and family: Whether one has adequate health care, whether one has access to healthy food, whether one’s housing and transportation costs are a not-onerous percentage of the household income, whether one has day care for children, whether one is free of high-interest consumer debt, and whether one can afford to save any money for the future. The privileged are those who have all of those things, or live in households that do. To suggest that having a TV in one’s room as a teen is an indicator of privilege when the real indicator of privilege is whether that teen can get a cracked tooth easily fixed doesn’t merely border on obtuseness, it’s rather emphatically stomping over to the other side of the line and jumping up and down.

  But perhaps one indicator of privilege is that one can creat an exercise like this and believe that it actually has anything to do with reality. Must be nice. I can only imagine it, myself.

  LAZY PEOPLE

  IRRITATE ME

  I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it a bad sign when I come across not one but two guides on the same day on how to be poor. The first came from The Stranger, one of Seattle’s alternative weeklies; in “The Power of Positive Poverty” (the Stranger’s cover story last week, how depressing is that), writer Hannah Levin goes into great detail on how to have a life in Seattle with an income of about $10,000; it apparently involves trips to food banks and occasional groveling to the electric company to get your bill trimmed. The second comes from London, where writer Peter Tatchell reports that he’s been living adequately, if not lavishly, for the last two decades at under 7000 pounds annually (which, as it happens, also translates to about $10,000 per year). Of these two situations, I would believe it’s probably easier to live poor in London than in Seattle; London’s probably a bit more pricey overall, but England also still has a more comprehensive safety net than the US, so if you r
eally get screwed, you’re probably better off.

  No matter how you slice it, however, trying to make a go of it for $10,000 a year still pretty much sucks. Both Levin and Tatchell attempt make a virtue of their position—Tractell notes that the physical exercise required by poverty (no car) has kept him pretty well buffed even at age 50, while Levin touts a potluck congregation with other equally strapped friends as a reasonable social alternative to going out nights and getting trashed (which, I should note, it actually is). But neither of them, thankfully, is under any illusion that being poor is actually a totally positive state of affairs. “Poverty is embarrassing, frustrating, frightening, and depressing,” Levin notes; Tatchell, who self-describes as not especially materialistic, still dreams of living in a nicer place than subsidized housing, but doesn’t hold out much hope for it.

  Reading both of these pieces, which are well-written and well-thought out, you can’t help but ask yourself—hey, neither of these two people seem insane, utterly anti-social or entirely lacking in employable skills. So why are they living at or near the poverty line? The answer: Well, they’re writers, of course. Levin makes what incomes she does make as a freelance arts writer. This means she makes diddly; then there’s the fact that she’s an arts writer for alternative weeklies, which takes her down to the “less than diddly” level. In Tatchell’s case, his freelance writing is done to fund his gay activism campaigns, which are clearly the focus of his life, but which don’t make him any money at all.

  On the poverty thing, I’m ready to give Tatchell a pass; whether you agree with his brand of activism or not, activism takes a lot of time and effort, and the man’s made the conscious decision to forego a more comfortable life in order to campaign on the issues that are important to him, which is not something everyone’s willing to do. So, good on him—it sucks he’s poor, but he’s making a difference or at least pissing off a bunch of irritating straight people, which on most days can’t be considered a bad thing.